Books with title Maria, a Christmas Story

When Jay Frankston was a child, Christmas felt like a big party he wasn’t invited to. Jay is Jewish, and Christmas was everyone else’s holiday. Jay felt left out: Santa came down his chimney only in dreams, so when Jay grew up and had a family of his own, he decided to give his children what he had longed for. He bought a Christmas tree, loaded it with lights and tinsel—and topped it with a Star of David! He played Santa for his kids for three years, wearing a rubberized mask and a Santa suit his wife made for him. Yet something was still missing: Jay offered his services to orphanages and children’s hospitals, but they turned him down. Then he was given access to some of the thousands of letters written to Santa Claus by kids, letters that languished on the post office floor every year. This one called out to him:Dear Santa, I hope you get my letter. I am eleven years old. I have two brothers and a baby sister. Our father died last year, and our mother is sick. I know there are many kids poorer than we are. I want nothing for myself, but could you send us a blanket to keep Mommy warm at night? SusyJay found eight more letters like Susy’s, and sent the kids a telegram:: GOT YOUR LETTER. WILL BE AT YOUR HOUSE ON CHRISTMAS DAY. SANTA. Then he went out and spent $150 on gifts. On Christmas he dressed in his Santa costume, and his wife, Monique, drove him to each of the nine destinations. Eventually, some toy manufacturers heard about what Jay was doing; they gave him lots of goodies, and before long he was Santa Claus to 120 youngsters every Christmas.Jay recalls a seven-year-old girl who was visiting a home where he was distributing gifts. She hung back in a corner, and when Jay asked her if she’d ever received anything for Christmas, she said sadly, “No.” When he offered her a doll, she whispered to him, “I’m Jewish.”“I’m Jewish too,” he whispered back, handing her the doll.

A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana—the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film.The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family’s typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street.This edition of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parker’s shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father’s pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie’s duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie’s unstoppable campaign to get Santa—or anyone else—to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid”?The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone.From the Hardcover edition.